


The Point Of It All

by bodysnatch3r



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drug Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-10 00:02:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1152400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thorin is a drug addict with a deathwish that locks his lips shut tight over his teeth and eyes so empty you could wade across them with surprising ease. Dwalin is a bouncer at one of the priciest nightclubs in town- and one particularly rainy evening, he stumbles upon Thorin and his shallow murky eyes. And he happens to find them beautiful.<br/>This may or may not be the perfect recipe for disaster: if Dwalin decides to save Thorin, that is.<br/>Which, of course, he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Point Of It All

**Author's Note:**

> Based on Lucre's [art](http://ladynorthstar.tumblr.com/post/73834062023/ati-suggested-me-to-draw-bouncer-dwalin-and).
    
    
    And just 'cause they call themselves experts  
    It doesn't mean sweet fuck all...  
    They've got the permanent press  
    Homes with a stable address  
    And they've got excitement  
    And life by the fistful  
    But you've got the needle  
    I guess that's the point of it all

 **The Point Of It All** , by Amanda Palmer

* * *

This isn't existing this isn't breathing this isn't  _being_. This is a thick deep emptiness that pukes inside his mouth every time he tries to open his eyes.

And yet the bench is cold and cool and wet and comfortable and his hands are nothing but talons and his brain, this funny little rattling thing, this horrid thing, this disgusting thing that feels like it's going to crawl out of his eyes like the spiders he hallucinates that have laid eggs in his tear ducts is so heavy it makes his bones creak, his skull split in ten different points.

Thorin feels like vomiting. 

He stares at the ceiling that is a striking shade of blue before his tired choking throat contracts and his stomach spasms before he can stop it: he vomits to the side, onto grass, luckily sits up on time so that he doesn't dirty the only set of clothes he has or choke on the bile. But he  _does_  try to stop it, without thinking, from burning his mouth and he presses a hand against his lips to stall it, and fails, and now his hand is dirty, and his throat is raw, and he still wishes he were dead. 

Not dead,  _high_.

It's different and the same and exactly what his burning teeth scream back at him.

He shakes his head and suddenly his bones and marrow sit uncomfortably within his skin. He needs to get up. He needs to get moving. (His brain tells him it's not a ceiling overhead but it's the sky) and then he blinks and remembers where he is, it's a park, he hid in a park for the night and someone stole his fucking blanket off of him. Sometime during the last weeks, winter finally melted into slush and into spring: he's seeing it now, it's filling him to the brim only now. He blinks at the sun and it tattoos itself on his retinas, leaves specks of golden dancing in front of his eyes in its wake.

Thorin is tired, he realizes. Thorin is empty. Thorin wishes he could disintegrate into dirt. Thorin doesn't know whether he is suicidal or not, but Thorin doesn't allow himself to think that much, these days. His thoughts are uncomfortable, rotten, roughly stuffed inside his mind and they leak from the seams. It's a nasty business, through and through. It's a nasty business he's force-fed down his throat and decided he was comfortable with it sticking there.

He needs money, he realizes. He needs money, and a fix. But he's a proud person, still, there are a few things he hasn't been stripped of yet, he isn't going to beg.

He isn't ready to beg, and he certainly won't panhandle, and there is no way in the world he is ever going to ask his sister for money, and it's for the best, because she already lost an older brother to the drink and Thorin's been steadily breaking her heart bit by bit, a shaky phonecall here and a night crashing on her couch there, corroding it with the way his patchwork of a face always blossoms in a smile whenever he sees his nephews. She doesn't deserve more ache, he will do with what he has. He stares at his dirty hand and his head spins. 

He doesn't even know what time it is, and as he tries to stand up it feels as if his bones are being ripped from inside his muscle- there is nothing left but an uneasy sense of emptiness that leaves his head spinning. It's morning, this much he can tell from the fact that the park is empty save for a jogger he spots from afar. He quickly rinses his face in the fountain, no one sees him, and then he's dragging his carcass through a hole in the hedge. He needs a fix, that's the only thought that's currently galloping at light speed through his head.

He needs a fix.

He needs a fix.

 _He needs a fix_.

* * *

His hands are colder and shakier than he remembers, a crack of knuckles every time he bends his wrists. There's fresh roses decorating his skin, the crook of his left arm has blossomed in shades of blue and yellow, stained by the season and the sun- a dead man's flesh, if it weren't for his nose dripping and the slow light-headed heaviness that's substituted itself with his blood, imbibing his every fiber with thickness that makes Thorin feel like he's breathing through heavy, blisfully murky molasses. His chest rises and falls and there is lead where his diaphragm should be, and his sternum has been laced with arsenic. He could not be more content.

Thorin is happy to see that each thought his mind grasps is too fickle to dissect, they just bleed into one another like ink spread in water, clouds of reds and greens both beautiful and dangerous, the elusive type of fear that unnerves you deep at night, when you read things that usually don't scare you but then they do all of a sudden, the lights are off and there's cracks in the wall and corners you never took the time to look at, and now that you're staring at them you can see the shadows throbbing, ready to strike. He ignores all of these feelings in exchange for the calmness the white static the sensation of floating just a few inches too far, too deep, too out of himself too stuck to the ceiling not part of this world  _he doesn't care_.

His hands are cold, though, and the rain filling the sewers and sinking within his bones still smells of January's freeze and ice- Thorin doesn't like it, he knows he'll freeze to death if he doesn't find a safer place- but what part of him cares about dying, though? Is it instinct or whatever small essence of coherence remains in his synapses that makes him move? Is it fate or blood dripping from his teeth, or the fear of the cold, or nothing at all? Is it emptiness, the need for touch, the bright city lights shining through his fuzzy brain, the man that runs into him as he stumbles out of the dirty corner he dug himself a nest in?

The other curses when he crashes into him and nearly makes Thorin fall, and he isn't carrying an umbrella, not that Thorin notices or cares.

"Shit, I'm sorry, didn't mean to."

Deep voice, rough and smooth and feeling like water jumping off a cliff. Thorin shakes his head to stop his eyes from swimming and tries to focus on whoever's standing in front of him.  He's bulky, tattooed, shaved head, both ears pierced. He's soaked to the bone and the paper he was using to try and at least cover himself a little has nearly melted to pulp.

He tries to force his tongue to work and build a phrase, but it's groggy and sluggish, mis-matched, jagged. Broken, unusable. A flash of self-hatred gets lost in the crashing of leaves in his head, drenched in rain.

"I'm all right," he tries to say. He's not sure it worked. He's not sure he said anything, because the man in front of him glances at him suspiciously, eyeing him up and down, maybe noticing the tracks on his arms, maybe not. He arches an eyebrow and then just nods, "All right. Have a good day." and walks past Thorin.

Thorin feels like he's being pulled back to the ground, blood dripping into his body, spilling from his heart, thin blood, watery blood, lungs that are actually rain clouds and arteries that are actually twigs and roots, he is a clogged sewer, he is autumn eternal, neverending winter. He doesn't know what happens next.

All he knows is that a curtain is suddenly pulled, and for a moment there is darkness.

* * *

Dwalin walks another block or so, squinting as the rain makes it hard to see where he's going. He's finally given up on his morning paper to work as a decent umbrella and is now just thinking about the hot cup of coffee and the warm bath that are waiting for him.

If it weren't for the fact that whenever he blinks he sees a pair of cloudy blue eyes (barely discernible under the stranger's hood and his knotted messy long hair, the unkempt scruff on his cheeks) and nervousness grips the point where his stomach meets his throat in a dance that feels like two opponents bowing in traditional respect and then ruthlessly, relentlessly trying to kill each other. There was something in the gaze. The gaze. The gaze, the empty blue eyes that looked shallow- no, not shallow... or at least, not as if they were shallow to begin with. The stranger's eyes looked like pools that had been drained of the reflection of the sky all at once: you could see that they'd been full, once, but now all that filled them was a dark pupil throbbing with pain and the vacant expression of a walking corpse.

Suddenly, Dwalin realizes what was wrong and off and simply _unnatural_. The man's a junkie. The man's skin is empty underneath and the man's bones are brittling rattling, rolled in a bowl to tell a madman's fortune. The man's arms were covered in holes.

He doesn't know why he turns back, despite the rain, despite the chill, despite the fact that he knows that it's the worst thing he could do, the worst thing, the _worst thing_. He doesn't know why he takes a leap he hadn't taken in six months, twelve days and three hours (he misses him, he still stupidly does despite the warning signs in his brain and the feeble notion that he didn't deserve him anyway), but he turns back, walks back, and finds Thorin lying against the wall. Neon lights make his face stand out in all the wrong ways, cheekbones painting a shadowy picture of helplessness.

“C'mon.”

Dwalin helps him to his feet, and Thorin can barely stand.

* * *

He sleeps sixteen hours.

Thorin wakes up with distant memories of waking up on a dew-soaked bench and for a moment feels like he is trapped within an image encased in a frame, for a second he's scared he's gone crazy.

He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling and realizes there's a river of cracks running from the furthermost corner across the paint, kissing a spiderweb through the middle, its delicate thin deadly strands skipping back and forth in a breeze. The window is open, the curtains are yellow, the sun is out, Thorin feels a little bit less nauseous than usual. It occurs to him he hasn't eaten properly in God knows how long, and it also occurs to him that it's a coherent thought, a properly processed thought, something he's allowed himself to dwell on.

He also realizes he's lying on a couch he doesn't know, it's too soft, too well-kept (a horrid dissonance with the crumbling plaster overhead), doesn't smell as bad as the things he's used to. His head is buzzing slightly with what will soon become either the unescapable need to get high or a pounding migraine, but for now he basks in the feeling of warmth spreading through his limbs.

“Slept well?”

The same waterfall voice greets him into full consciousness, and Thorin sits upright to see the man he'd bumped into the evening before (or was it afternoon? Time is a fuzzy, uncontrollable thing he hardly even cares about anymore) standing in a doorway that seems to lead to a kitchen.

Thorin blinks at him and then asks, “Did... did we-?”

The stranger seems taken aback before quickly shaking his head upon realizing what he's asking, “No, no. God no. You just slept.”

“Slept a lot.” Thorin says back, amazed that he can even talk right.

The other shrugs, “I guess you needed it.”

He's been staring at Thorin with a quaint little smile. Thorin hopes it isn't pity, despite fearing it is, and so he just stares at his grimy hands. The awkward silence hits both of them soon enough, and so does a deep, deep tiredness. If he could, Thorin would sleep another million years, and maybe never even wake up.

Instead he says, almost without thinking:

“Do you mind if I take a shower?”

And Christ, _he doesn't even know the guy's name_.

* * *

He leans back against the glass and watches as steam rises around him, feels boiling water scorch tired skin back to life. The old crumbles and splits into ash, the new that is already aging blossoms, flakes already peeling off. He knows there is rot on his skin and dirt he will never wash off, an infection so deeply rooted Thorin feels like he is always walking in a poisoned cloud. And the things he touches turn to cancerous infected piles of flesh.

He wishes it weren't so.

But it's always been this way, and now he's showering in a stranger's home, a man who has heavy metal posters framed and hung in his living room and the latest Assassin's Creed game on his coffee table, perfectly muscled arms covered in tattoos and the face of a man who's fought tooth and nail to get where he is.

Thorin, on the other hand, accurately avoids intercepting the mirror. He doesn't feel like looking himself in the eye- there is no need to let the dying patient face head-first their illness unsupervised. He feels both dizzy and elated for a moment, his body becoming unhinged from his flesh as he steps out of steam and water and the cold of a tiled floor greets him back into its arms.

There's a t-shirt and a pair of pants that are slightly discolored and slightly too big for him, but they'll certainly do. He feels like burning his old clothes, the same way he feels like burning himself. He feels _human_ , carved into stone and wood, a walking thing that exists, and this alone is enough to scare him so deep within himself he knows only something strong will be able to claw him back into the sunlight by burying him even deeper. A contradiction, yes, but he is nothing but a walking one.

The man's name is Dwalin, it turns out, he's a bouncer, he works at _Ered Luin's_ and he looks sadder and more tired and older than he does in the picture in the hall of him and a clean-shaven man with a long auburn braid. Thorin had looked at the photograph maybe a little too curiously when making his way to the bathroom and felt like an eavesdropping sicko peeping Tom, a criminal: staring at the picture had left a bad taste in his mouth and a vague sense of disappointment at himself.

He's curious and feels guilty about it: luckily, he also knows it is not his place to ask.

Thorin ties his mass of hair in a loose bun and casts a glance at the reflection in the mirror still partially stained by steam before stepping out of the bathroom. A bag of bones he doesn't even want to recognize stares back.

Dwalin's made eggs when he peeks into the kitchen, “What time is it?” Thorin asks. His unexpected host is eating the meal he's just cooked and reading a book.

“Eleven AM. Want some breakfast?” he answers, setting the paperback down for a moment and keeping his place with a finger slipped in between the pages.

Thorin isn't so sure his stomach could handle any _proper_ food that isn't alcoholic and liquid, but on the other hand he's so hungry the light-headedness is threatening to take over completely with every step he takes. And so he gingerly sits down at the table, despite the smell of coffee making his sinuses burn uncomfortably, and says nothing whilst Dwalin lights himself a cigarette.

“Do you smoke?” the bouncer asks, glancing at the needle tracks Thorin quickly hides by placing both arms under the table.

“I used to.” Thorin replies, tentatively taking a bite of omelette. He doesn't want to wolf it all down, but God knows when his next meal will be. Dwalin laughs a little and Thorin doesn't know whether to take it as an offense or not. He simply gingerly keeps on eating, scared that the plate of food might disappear somehow if he isn't too careful, scared that he might break the cutlery.

“So I'm Dwalin, anyway.”

Thorin concentrates his gaze on the book ( _The Dubliners_ , by James Joyce) and then decides he is ready to make eye contact, “I'm Thorin.”

“Pleased to meet you, Thorin.” Dwalin says, still smiling, pouring them both a mug of coffee.

“So do you do this with every junkie you meet?” Thorin asks after a few quiet moments of sipping. He realizes he needs to feel the empty behind his eyes as fast as he can. Talking seems like the right thing to do.

Dwalin arches an eyebrow.

“Do what?”

“Take them in and feed them?”

The bouncer shrugs, “No.”

Thorin doesn't ask any other questions. He lowers his face, finishes his brunch and then seems to fidget whilst still sitting down. Dwalin's already started to clear the table. Thorin quickly stands up and tries to help. He feels guilty, it spreads drowsily from his chest into his shoulders, rending his throat more tight than it already is. He doesn't have money to pay the man back so he figures he might at least try and help around the house. But Dwalin shoos him away.

“It's fine.”

Thorin seems even more flustered than before, and he quickly exits the kitchen to slip his armor on, which is his ever-present hoodie, a thick layer of cotton and fleece he is hardly ever seen without. It protects him from the cold and from the outside shadows and it reminds him of home.

Although it isn't home, things being what they are, it is good enough.

When he walks back into the kitchen, Dwalin's doing the dishes, there's twenty pounds on the table Thorin doesn't even consider and he just takes it as his cue to leave.

* * *

Dwalin sighs to himself and runs a hand over his eyes. He's cold. He's cold, and fidgety, and doesn't know what to do. He has to be at work in an hour and he doesn't feel like moving at all, not one bit, he's much too tired (sleepless nights spent counting the drops the bathroom faucet cries out have bled him dry, he should fix it one day or another, when he has the will or time or motivation) and much too... he's wrong. He feels unnatural, as if his torso were slid five inches too much to the side, and has left space for air to blow through. It makes his insides rattle like old wood and dead crows.

He stares at nothing (the chair where Thorin had been sitting that morning, actually, but the conscious part of his brain does not acknowledge it) for seconds during which he listens to the kitchen faucet drip and then he snaps himself out of it,

“All right. Let's get going.”

stands up, grabs his keys and tries not to think about the blue-eyed junkie. Of course, it proves impossible.

Of course, he spends the rest of the afternoon and evening calling himself an idiot, a cretin, the kind of ridiculous person who develops feelings at first sight and everything in between. He snarls at celebrity wannabes and chases away paparazzis with nothing but a few well-hissed words. And yet there's something fitted wrong in his teeth, in his mouth, in the bridge of his nose. His face feels glued on wrong, his thoughts feel the same. The night he's standing in tastes unnaturally of bitterness and unresolved thoughts that fester inside his mind like maggots. Dwalin doesn't want to think about the man he found in the streets. He knows he has no right to think about him, that all he did was an act of charity that made him feel better for a few moments because his mind was a blank unsullied canvas and he gave himself that luxury solely because Dwalin is tired, dead tired, of being unable to sleep. He stares at the man in front of him (tall, blond, green eyes, a scar on the left side of his face that makes him all the more “mysterious”, and Dwalin's sure he's seen him somewhere, in a magazine probably, he must be a fashion designer of sorts) and lets him into the bar. He can't seem to chase the dirt off of the canvas in his head, although it isn't dirt, it's the first speck of gold in a million years, and how could he _like_ a junkie? Thorin was a tired, ragged, exhausted bag of bones, something worthless and empty and destined to die in a corner choking on spit and bile. But the eyes-

( _christ it's always the eyes_ )

the eyes had something in them that he wants to see again. He knows it's a spark- something shining and bright, some lost light that is just sitting at the bottom of the shallow blues. He wants to reach through the murky surface. He lets them fill his mind with what little water they have left within them, waves crashing into his thoughts so loud he doesn't care about anything anymore.

It's a moment.

A ridiculous moment.

But it's there. It's a moment.

Dwalin wants to lose himself in someone's touch again. He calls himself an idiot. He calls himself _an idiot_ , and lets the words slid out with the smoke of the cigarette he poisons himself with during his walk home.

* * *

His heart crashes headfirst against his ribs, and his hands are shaking, his hands are shaking, his eyes hurt whenever he moves them, there's something _wrong_ \- bone-wrong, throat-wrong, skin-wrong. He's hurting.

He's swimming.

He's burning.

The water he waded through up to now has become lava scorching his lungs and his hands and his stomach, Thorin closes his eyes and feels like he is floating. But his mind is burning.

But the floor he presses his forehead against is ice-cold, like his sweat, like his teeth. He is nothing. He wishes he were dead, his mind screams back at him that he's dying, that he's getting what he wants.

He won't remember this when he wakes up.

He's curled up on a floor somewhere in some building's entrance, and when he realizes he's overdosing is when someone opens the glass door and hits him on the back, and he's a mesmerizing terrifying thing, a horror mismatched, his vomit shining on fake marble the color of blood, someone cursing.

It takes Dwalin a moment to recognize Thorin. It takes him less than a second to grab him, force him in his car and drive him to the nearest ER.

* * *

She stares at her brother who's in a coma, who tried to kill himself, and feels the metal of her keyring press into her palm instead of her nails (and she's grateful, because she knows she'd be drawing blood if it were her nails).

Dis swallows very carefully, so that it doesn't feel too much like she's breaking any rules, because if she swallows too much, it'll hurt more than it already is, and she'll cry. And she does not feel like she has it within herself to cry.

Her brother is a mess. Thorin is thinner than she remembers him, smaller, paler, looks sicker under the crisscross of tubes feeding in and out of him.

“ _We don't know if he'll make it_.”

She juggles the phrase in her mouth, between the roof of it and the tip of her tongue, momentarily absent herself as she concentrates on the way the words roll in her flesh long enough for her to avoid dwelling on the cancer tearing through her thoughts. Dis is a breath away from screaming.

Her children are at home with her father, her youngest older brother is six feet under, her eldest older brother is a footstep away both from her and from death.

Dis is tiny and quiet and perched on a chair next to Thorin, who's sleeping after overdosing, who's dying, who she barely even knows anymore and loves with all her might. Family before anything. Family _is_ everything, they've raised each other, they've lost each other, they're losing each other.

She stares at the floor that smells of cleanliness, of Godliness, of doctors and antiseptic liquids and perfect pristine deaths. Not a single drop of blood to mark a passing.

It's wiped away before it can touch the ground.

She wants to scream. She slams her head back against the wall behind her to shut her tongue up, keep it in place. Not a sound breaks her lips. She is too scared to scream.

Thorin wakes up three hours later.

* * *

Dis stares at Thorin, Thorin doesn't dare stare back.

“I'm scared,” she croaks first, finally, lifting the weight off his shoulders. He can sink into nothing now that the conversation's started, he can stop being so tense.

She doesn't move. He still doesn't look at her.

“You shouldn't be.”

“You nearly killed yourself.”

“It doesn't matter.”

The sound she makes is a pained whine and moan and sob, something that terrifies Thorin, that feeds the guilt, that makes the fire roar, that hurts him so bad he suddenly wants to take it all back, he knows he needs a fix, he knows he needs to _do something_ , anything, to fill himself up, to mend her wounds, to save them both.

If he didn't feel so numb. If he didn't feel so empty.

Dis squeezes her eyes shut and lets the tears soak her voice, “ _I'm so scared_ ,” she repeats and wishes she had the courage to scream at her eldest brother, to yell and tear and bounce her fists off his chest and beg him to be kind to himself beg him to stop punishing himself, beg him, beg him, beg him.

 _Please come home_ she wishes she could scream.

Please come back to us.

Thorin doesn't come home, Thorin doesn't follow the trail, Thorin is too lost at sea, too wrapped up in himself, too selfish, too hurt. He has so many demons to wrestle the darkness makes it impossible to dwell on the way shadows dance.

He can't come home, home is nowhere.

Both of them know it.

Both of them regret it.

Neither of them will do anything about it.

They don't fight, they don't have it in themselves to fight. Thorin stands at Dis' door and she does nothing to stop him as he steps outside, plastic hospital bracelet still clinging to his wrist.

“I miss you.” she suddenly blurts out.

She's never seen her big brother's eyes turn so big, so scared, so drained of any blue there could be left. They used to look like water and sky and forget-me-not's.

Now they look like nothing.

* * *

There's someone knocking at his door.

It's four AM and there's someone knocking at his door and coughing in between.

Dwalin drags himself out of bed, cursing whoever's desperately pounding his hands against the wood and probably waking up all of his neighbors. He starts spitting out a string of curses as he unlocks with one hand and readies his preemptive baseball bat with the other.

And then freezes when his eyes meet dead blue ones.

“Oh my God. It's you.”

He swallows as Thorin stares at him and seems to beg, wordlessly, for all of the forgiveness the world has to offer. The world, it turns out, has none.

The woman living across the hall opens her door and squints at the two,

“Is everything all right?” she asks, neither angry nor worried. She sounds sleepy, more than anything.

Dwalin blinks away from Thorin and answers, “Everything's fine, Bryanna. Thank you for asking.”

She squints at the two, Thorin looking more ashamed than ever, and then shuts her door, mumbling something along the way. They're alone then, and the neon hallway light vibrates and buzzes loudly, threatening to turn itself off and actually never following through.

“How did you...?”

“I remembered from... from last month. And you're the only one named Dwalin in this building.”

 _Was it last month_? Thorin doesn't know.

He never knows anything anymore.

Dwalin seems taken aback.

“You mean you don't remember... _you don't remember yesterday_?”

Thorin's empty quizzical eyes though, give him all the answers he needs already.

Dwalin, on the other hand, remembers mopping up Thorin's blood and vomit off of the floor and trying to keep his hands from shaking too hard. He remembers how he'd worried for a complete stranger. He remembers how he'd checked him in and drove away, trying to chase the ugly feeling away from his throat by speeding as fast as he could. He cannot allow himself to fall again. He cannot. He cannot. He cannot.

But all Thorin's looking for is home. All Thorin needs is someplace he can hide in.

“Is... is your couch free?” he asks.

“Are you high?”

“Yes. Is your couch free?”

Dwalin sighs loudly and shrugs, “You're a stranger.”

“So are you.”

“Then why should I let you in? Why did you come _here_ , of all places?”

Thorin shrugs again.

“I have nowhere else to go.”

* * *

He falls in love.

Like the idiot he knows he is, he falls in love.

He realizes he's carved his heart out and presented it to Thorin, still bleeding, one evening when Thorin's wrapping his hands around a warm mug of tea and trying to keep the last of the shakes and the nausea down enough to drink it, and Dwalin's in the kitchen, and the junkie's profile is stark against the setting sun's light expanding like smoke in the room, and Dwalin surprises himself thinking, _you're beautiful_.

Thorin's been crashing on his couch for a month and a half now. He's been leaving small teeth-marks of his presence throughout the home, like a pair of socks forgotten on the living room floor or a mug that's just somehow become his favorite (it's the same mug he's clutching now), or laughter that's sharp around the edges one moment and quiet as a mouse the next, and the real, burning, sobbing, screaming, begging struggle of trying to get clean. Of trying to stay clean.

it's forced on him, yes. It's the rules Dwalin's set down.

No drugs. None, not even cigarettes. No alcohol.

You break the promise, you're out of the house.

Dwalin clears his throat and Thorin turns around with the kind of wide-eyed fear Dwalin's so quickly grown accustomed to: Thorin always feels like he's too much, too tall, too full, too big to fit within his skin. He quieted himself down, kept the nightmares at bay (he's an Afghanistan veteran, it turns out, and he has scars to prove it, which is how he started using, because the painkillers settled themselves right under his skin and made a home there, and once he didn't need them anymore the angry sick pockets of addiction screamed so loud the only thing he could do was tear them open and fill them with anything he could get his hands on, which eventually became heroin) and became the bony shadow that Dwalin is now smiling at. Thorin smiles back, and Dwalin's chest dangerously becomes a thin layer of plaster and brick dust ready to cave in.

“I'm cooking,” he says, “wanna help?”

Thorin tilts his head to the side as he listens. He's slightly blind in his left eye and slightly deaf in his left ear due to the time-bomb that broke his back exploding too close to him, and he technically needs prescription glasses, but he's never gotten around to getting them. He's never really cared enough to get them: when he was back on his feet he was deep into a choking addiction.

But there's so much under the surface. _There's so much more than an addiction_. There's an intelligent man with deep, swirling eyes that loves the quiet and talks about his nephews a lot (a blond sixteen year old called Fili, a dark-haired eleven year old called Kili) and about a suicidal brother and about his sister, life in Afghanistan and life before Afghanistan, being gay and growing up in a conservative household, a rich father and a mother dead when he was ten years old. A mind so vivid Dwalin doesn't know where to start, how to start, and it turns out he's fallen in love with it.

Stupidly fallen in love with it.

“What are you making?” Thorin asks, marvelling at the way Dwalin's eyes (a scarred right one given to him by a drunken father matches his slightly blind right one: they are a mirror image of each other in this way, and Thorin finds it comforting despite himself) light up when he whispers the way he does, always so scared of being too loud.

“Chocolate chip cookies.”

Thorin thinks and then nods slightly, “I'd like that.”

“You would?”

“I'd like that,” he repeats, and sets his mug down on the coffee table in front of the TV.

* * *

“You're drunk.”

Dwalin's voice is colder than he'd like it to be.

Thorin has no apology to offer, just his hands with nails bit down to the quick clinging to Dwalin's shirt.

“I'm sorry.” he says anyway. Dwalin takes a step back to escape Thorin's grasp and Thorin stumbles onto the couch.

“You're _drunk_.”

“I know.”

Thorin reeks of alcohol and he can barely string together the words he's sobbing. Dwalin sits across from him and buries his hands in his face.

“You'd promised.”

“I know.”

Thorin's voice is becoming a strained desperate strangled prayer.

Dwalin sighs, loud.

“I don't know what to do.”

“Don't kick me out. Please.”

_Don't kick me out. Please don't kick me out I've found home here I've found what I need here I've found you, despite everything I've found you. Don't leave me, don't let me go, don't give up on me. I beg of you._

Dwalin stands up, Dwalin paces, every step feels like a nail being forced through Thorin's palms already marked by the skin he's scraped off of them with what little remains of his nails. Dwalin stops and glares at him. It feels like a deathwish.

“I mean... _why do you even care_ , I'm just some junkie-”

Dwalin wishes he could laugh in Thorin's face, all of a sudden, because God- God, is Thorin really that blind? Is he that wrapped up within himself, is he that sick, that lonely, that tired? Because every time he breathes Dwalin's grown accustomed to holding onto the breath as if it were gold dripping through his fingers, every time he laughs it's blood rushing through his heart, he knows he'd never be able to kick him out.

He's lost himself. They both have. He's fallen, hard, and he is loving and cherishing every broken bone and fractured vertebrae and the trickle of blood that's decorating the pavement.

“Because... oh _God_ , Thorin, _I love you_!”

Dwalin's yelled. He realizes it a moment too late. Thorin is bleary eyed and unfocused, but his eyes crystallize for a moment in an expression of both fear and glee and panic, until they shatter again.

Dwalin's sure he's just ruined it all.

 _Nobody ever loves you anyway_.

Except for a blue-eyed, tired, thin junkie, whose mouth tastes of the cheap bourbon you found him vomiting on the curb outside your home, and you know this because he's stood up in a heartbeat and he's crying, but he's also kissing you, and you feel his trembling hands cup your cheeks, and you grasp onto the kiss like it's water being fed down your parched throat.

And you're in love. You're in love. You're both in love.

This feels like home, Dwalin realizes. And that's all that matters.

That's the point, in the end.


End file.
